It is a common advertising and promotional technique to place coupons, discount cards, prizes or other promotional materials into containers such as cartons for breakfast cereal or snack items or into bagged products such as potato chips. The coupon is highly visible to the consumer who can then use the coupon for the intended purpose, such as for discounts on future purchases or rebates. The coupon itself may also contain a prize or other premium, often a molded plastic figure or other piece. Accordingly, the term “coupon” used herein includes any type of insert, coupon, card, sheet, receipt, warranty, prize, premium, or other part that can be advantageously handled in accordance with the invention hereinafter described. Similarly, the terms “container” and “receiving product” are used in the broadest possible context to include containers such as boxes, tubs, cans, and vessels of all kinds as well as other coupon receiving objects that can be advantageously used with the present invention, such as the fill tube of a form, fill, and seal packaging machine.
Placing coupons by hand is very expensive as it is labor intensive and human hands cannot always keep up with the speed of modern automated packaging equipment. Thus, packaging equipment manufacturers have developed a variety of automated coupon inserter machines for placing coupons on or into products. Typically, coupon inserting devices operate by discharging or positioning a single coupon in each container rapidly moving along a conveyor system or into a chute or tube of some other type of product handling system. There are several methods and apparatus for placing single coupons. One requires a stack of pre-cut coupons that are individually dispensed from a downwardly sloping channel, such as the system shown in Prewer, U.S. Pat. No. 4,530,200. In that system, pusher elements and advancing rollers coact to withdraw the forwardmost coupon from the pre-cut stack. The coupon is then drawn into the downwardly sloping channel to a dispensing location. In another apparatus, shown in Gallimore, U.S. Pat. No. 4,197,113, a reciprocal vacuum head picks a coupon from a stack of pre-cut coupons and places the coupon on a conveyor system, which in turn transports the coupons to the containers. Another system, shown in Lewis et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,354,894, requires the use of a mechanical cutting device to separate each coupon from a continuous web. Once separated, the coupons are dispensed to the containers using a conveyor system. In yet another system, a device separates a single coupon from a continuous web of coupons using a bursting technique and places the coupon into the container or places the coupon into the fill tube of a form-fill-seal packaging system. Such devices are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,845,462 and 6,082,079, respectively, which are assigned to the assignee of the present invention. While such systems are generally effective with flat coupons, they have not been found to be entirely effective for use in connection with thick or bulky coupons such as overwrapped plastic prizes or parts (such coupons shall be referred to herein generally as “three-dimensional coupons”). This invention relates to an improved coupon delivery system as compared to the systems described above and to solutions to some of the problems raised or not solved thereby.